


The Wheel Turns

by nsmorig



Series: Cartography In Extremis [2]
Category: Pillars of Eternity
Genre: Cartography, Dramatics, Epistolary, Eso pulling out that SAT vocabulary, Gen, Moral Dilemmas, Prompt Fill, The Endless Paths
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-10
Updated: 2018-04-10
Packaged: 2019-04-21 05:09:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,249
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14277591
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nsmorig/pseuds/nsmorig
Summary: We have found Gabrannos.There is the secret.There is one of the secrets.





	The Wheel Turns

**Author's Note:**

  * For [palinopsia](https://archiveofourown.org/users/palinopsia/gifts).



 

I have great reservations about recording this.

 

There is a limit to what history needs to know.

 

I shan’t allow this to be published, but I need to write it down.

 

We were in the Endless Paths all day, from dusk to dusk. Time becomes a mutable thing when you can’t see the sun; I say ‘all day’ in the loosest sense, and we may have returned to the land of the living weeks or months later, like children that get lost in faery-land.

 

The seventh level seems something out of a dream. It was lit when we arrived, orange braziers shining with something almost but not quite fire. I thought I was accustomed to the way a flame paints everything in flickers, the world shifting like a zoetrope as the light moves, but this was-- the movement of the light was just odd enough that I could not adapt, and saw shades where there were none. I saw shades where there _were_ shades, too, and that was also distressing.

 

I do not exaggerate when I speak of the Endless Paths as some sort of hell. Shades and spectres, dead things moving by some force alien to light, people not-people built of gleaming adra and not a soul between them. How is the air breathable, moving through dead lungs, never coming under the sun?

 

Things spin in stone cages, silent totems of the world above; they have taken elemental spirits as the only way to see the earth in motion, and stripped them of freedom. There is no way to free them, and if we could what would they do, driven mad by centuries? I have seen feral dogs, locked in boxes until they would savage their mother, trapped and turned to something else; I do not want to see what happens when one locks up fire.

 

A forge. Good gods.

 

I wish the bellows had never been invented. I wish that we had never mastered shaping metal, if this place is what it brings.

 

We have found Gabrannos.

 

There is the secret.

 

There is one of the secrets.

 

Gabrannos was mad. There is another secret.

 

Kana thinks that he was like the blights, once-whole, driven mad by centuries never coming under the sun. Perhaps it is inevitable, simply what happens when the soul is prevented from travelling on; perhaps my Steward will end her days as mad as the things we have found here.

 

Entropy. Souls corrode.

 

Kana may be right. But here is another secret: I think Gabrannos was always mad. Not this tortured madness, not forgivably mad, just dangerously mad. The sort of mad a person becomes not because of the unrelenting darkness, or the Thing in the adra that leaches into the souls here, but because of hate, curled up in the soul and polluting everything it touches. The common kind of mad.

 

Another secret: the floor indents. Kana’s shadow bent, where it fell on the eastmost corner of the room. Sitting there, low to the floor with my calipers and compass, I saw what I think everyone else missed. The stone is solid, but the tile has fallen out of alignment.

 

I have re-drawn my maps for the seventh level and I missed something. My base measurements were over-corrected; I aligned them with the room boundaries, not what the space was. An elementary mistake, but it has been corrected now.

 

There is a room with no entrance.

 

The rest of the party returned to the surface, and I envy them for it. I stayed behind; I told them I was correcting elevation readings for the third floor, which we have scoured from top to bottom and which is reasonably safe; in a way, I was not lying, because I adjusted three data points. I will tell myself that. It is not precisely a deception.

 

I returned to the seventh floor, chisel scavenged from the fifth floor, waterskin full of what little clean water I could find. It was clearer, now that I knew what I was looking for; the ceiling on that wall did not slope as it would if it were load-bearing, and there are thin lines of erosion on the floor where the door opened.

 

Water, poured slowly onto the tiles, made everything clear. It pooled in the indent and drained slowly through the hair-thin cracks where the tile moved.

 

The edges of the tile were too thin, and the mechanism probably too precise, to chisel at the edges; but inserted into the dark line at the bottom of the door, hit with enough force to shift the entire structure a centimeter upwards, it will do the job.

 

One could not pull aside the door with brute force, but moving the door moved the mechanism, and sure enough the tile jerked upwards out of its hollow, just far enough that I could fix my fingertips on the edges and lift it slowly, slowly out.

 

The mechanism was clearly once a work of art. Time and creeping damp and temperature changes had warped the metal such that the tile had shifted, but it would still work. Pressing on the plate, though, only caused the door to drop again, sending my chisel skittering, dented, across the floor.

 

Air blights are not made of air as we breathe it. An air blight, as a manifestation of something else, does not contain the water and dust and bits of dead things that the air we breathe is swarming with. They are also substantially warmer than ambient air. This means an air blight of the kind they kept captive here weighs less than nothing.

 

Gabrannos seemed the sort to keep a piece of the sky prisoner here under the earth, never coming under the sun, merely to keep his secrets.

 

A finger, under the plate, lifting it by barely a millimetre, just enough to tick over from one set of gears to another, and the door shuddered and lifted.

 

Here is another secret: the tablet was destroyed. The drafts were not.

 

Gabrannos’ desk was spartan, scrolls neatly stacked in a rack and a single wax tablet, the span of my hand, sitting inconspicuously in the centre. Engwithan runes were poked out in a tiny, cramped hand.

 

This was why I said he was mad.

 

An invocation to self-sacrifice in the pursuit of glory, very well, that sort of silliness is common nowadays, but-- ‘Glorious, it is, to die in service to the nation.’

 

An invocation to self-sacrifice is all well and good. Glory is a silly concept but so common I cannot exactly call it dangerous.

 

The text stared up at me from the table. It is a marvel that the wax did not melt with the heat of its fervour. I cannot express this in words other than those that I read, and I have little wish to recall them.

 

This, I can call dangerous. The pleading to protect a culture by attacking others-- this is what fueled the bloody, hard-fought Rauatai expansion, I think, this madness.

 

It is sheer arrogance on my part. It is complete ego, a patronising, mistrustful arrogance, and yet I am entirely convinced that I am right.

 

Ondra drown it all, flood the cities and take back the land, but this cannot be allowed to get back to Rauatai. Kana cannot see this. It will stay here, in this room with no door, trapped like some spirit of fire, never coming under the sun. All things corrode. Perhaps this will, too.


End file.
